There was a bug in the Google Ajax Slideshow code which meant that when you clicked on an image, instead of redirecting your browser to the source of the image, the slideshow would redirect your browser to the URL of the current page.

I’ve fixed that bug, thanks to some excellent advice from jgeerdes at https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/google-ajax-search-api/Ljom17bulZc/UYg2154Nwp0J

The problem with the images in these feeds is that they’re either too large or too small.

The MediaRSS specification has a <media:thumbnail> tag which lets you have a thumbnail image in your feed. That’s great, but the image size of the thumbnail is 75×75 pixels, which is useless for a nice looking slideshow. It ends up looking terribly blurry with no detail.

The Google Ajax Feeds API tries to get around this by letting you specify a “thumbnailTag” in the slideshow options object. Basically, you set this to “content” to tell the API to look for the image in the “content” section of the feed, rather than the <media:thumnail> section. This is also great, but the problem is that Flickr uses the LARGE (or even worse, ORIGINAL) image size in this section. So you get nice large detailed images in the feed, but they’re so large that they take ages to load, and your slideshow sits there for ages saying “Loading….” while it grabs the huge images and chews up your audiences bandwidth.

So I wrote a simple PHP screen scraping utility which grabs the Flickr feed, and changes the ImageUrl…_L.jpg to ImageUrl….M.jpg – in other words, it modifies the feed to include the medium size image rather than the large size.

Medium sized images are fine for slideshows, and they load quite quickly.

The problem with the images in these feeds is that they’re either too large or too small.

The MediaRSS specification has a <media:thumbnail> tag which lets you have a thumbnail image in your feed. That’s great, but the image size of the thumbnail is 75×75 pixels, which is useless for a nice looking slideshow. It ends up looking terribly blurry with no detail.

The Google Ajax Feeds API tries to get around this by letting you specify a “thumbnailTag” in the slideshow options object. Basically, you set this to “content” to tell the API to look for the image in the “content” section of the feed, rather than the <media:thumnail> section. This is also great, but the problem is that Flickr uses the LARGE (or even worse, ORIGINAL) image size in this section. So you get nice large detailed images in the feed, but they’re so large that they take ages to load, and your slideshow sits there for ages saying “Loading….” while it grabs the huge images and chews up your audiences bandwidth.

So I wrote a simple PHP screen scraping utility which grabs the Flickr feed, and changes the ImageUrl…_L.jpg to ImageUrl….M.jpg – in other words, it modifies the feed to include the medium size image rather than the large size.

Medium sized images are fine for slideshows, and they load quite quickly.